DiskSpy

28 Aug 2009

Software LED shows disk activity.

DiskSpy... While many PC makers put hard disk LEDs on the outside of their computers, Apple hasn't put any disk LEDs on any Maces since the SE/30. Some Mac old-timers may remember the number of products that were available during the System 7 era that provided a software disk LED in the menu bar.

DiskSpy is a small program that acts as a software disk LED for Macs running Mac OS X. DiskSpy sits in the menu bar and gives visual notifications when the OS is reading from or writing to a disk. DiskSpy does not run in the kernel region, does not use any private frameworks or undocumented APIs, does not require any hacks to use, doesMore...

What's New

Version 1.5:

Now built with 64-bit addressing support on both Intel and PowerPC Macs.

Requirements

Mac OS X 10.2 or later

Related Links

Disk Spy Solid, a more advanced version of DiskSpy. In addition to giving users a "software disk LED" that shows local disk reads and writes in the menu bar, DiskSpy Solid also shows network activity in the menu bar. DiskSpy Solid will show when a read or write is occurring on any active physical network interface. Some possible uses include watching reads and writes to network disks (including Apple's iDisk service, AFP/NFS/Samba/WebDAV disks, and FTP servers), watching a program use the network, or simply testing to see if a connection is working.
DiskSpy Solid has several advantages over other programs that have a similar feature. Many other programs that show network traffic use the command line utility Netstat, which means they may use more CPU time, they are dependent on a program that runs with super-user privileges, they are often fooled by loopback and pipe traffic, and they don't get information in real time. DiskSpy Solid has none of these problems.

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DiskSpy... While many PC makers put hard disk LEDs on the outside of their computers, Apple hasn't put any disk LEDs on any Maces since the SE/30. Some Mac old-timers may remember the number of products that were available during the System 7 era that provided a software disk LED in the menu bar.

DiskSpy is a small program that acts as a software disk LED for Macs running Mac OS X. DiskSpy sits in the menu bar and gives visual notifications when the OS is reading from or writing to a disk. DiskSpy does not run in the kernel region, does not use any private frameworks or undocumented APIs, does not require any hacks to use, does not trap any low-level I/O calls, does not run as the super user, nor does it actually write to any disk(s), so it is safe to use.

Version 1.5:

Now built with 64-bit addressing support on both Intel and PowerPC Macs.